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Is Elon Beyond Reproach?

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Re: Is Elon Beyond Reproach?

#21

Post by antiterra »

What I see with Elon at Twitter is classic attempt at disruption. This is often characterized by somewhat naively asking questions like “Why do we need to bother with x” or “Why can’t we just do y.” Invariably, some portion of the ideas and shortcuts are failures, revealing that “we have to do x because” or “we can’t just do y because.”

The question here is, can Elon find enough shortcuts and ideas that work and recover sufficiently from failures for the ones that don’t?

I think it’s still up in the air, but it does seem like a challenge with the current financial obligation. Elon understands the product a lot better than a lot of ‘classic’ CEOs might, but the kind of close calls Elon admits Tesla had won’t eternally be in his favor.

https://thedriven.io/2020/11/04/elon-musk-tesla-almost-went-...

Re: Is Elon Beyond Reproach?

#23

Post by sdiacom »

Is the difficulty of running a company proportional to the technical difficulty of the problems it attempts to solve? I believe there's a lot more to running a company than finding a solution to a technical problem without killing anyone in the process.

I think it's fair to assume that Paul Graham, who runs a startup incubator, already knows that it takes more than that to run a company successfully. So what's the point of broadcasting this simplistic, condescending viewpoint to his followers?

If I was one, I would feel that he's looking down on me. "We smart, you dumb. We do thing good, so we also do other thing good. Shut up and clap for creator."

Re: Is Elon Beyond Reproach?

#24

Post by mattbrewsbytes »

What I think Elon is missing out on is he has the perspective of the end user of twitter and perceives all the problems from that viewpoint and appears to be making changes to better the end user experience. The reality of how twitter functions might be that the end user experience is the tip of the iceberg and all the rest of the iceberg that supports the tip has nothing to do with end users and is more focused on content moderation/advertising (which are the actual products of twitter) and scaling of that system, abstraction layers to make scaling feasible, etc.

None of his other companies have the scale and variability that an always online global social media company brings. In software they are likely an entirely unique set of problems that only a few companies have built solutions around (which many software people like to think they need those solutions but I digress.) Those solutions are widely talked about in software circles which is why quite a few people are commenting about how Elon's comments are flat out wrong. Software folks that may not work on these systems at least understand how these things should work, what micro-services are, why they are used, why they might be a bad choice, what GraphQL is, etc. There are far, far fewer people that understand the internals of EV tech and far fewer for rocketry. What he is facing is a huge number of people that can read one of his tweets and know that the tweet doesn't pass the smell test for BS.

Re: Is Elon Beyond Reproach?

#26

Post by feet »

mattbrewsbytes wrote: post #24

What I think Elon is missing out on is he has the perspective of the end user of twitter and perceives all the problems from that viewpoint and appears to be making changes to better the end user experience. The reality of how twitter functions might be that the end user experience is the tip of the iceberg and all the rest of the iceberg that supports the tip has nothing to do with end users and is more focused on c…

Is disabling the 2fa miceoservice without removing existing 2fa from accounts better for user experience?

Users normally like to log into services they use, but I may be wrong.

Re: Is Elon Beyond Reproach?

#27

Post by dekhn »

mattbrewsbytes wrote: post #24

What I think Elon is missing out on is he has the perspective of the end user of twitter and perceives all the problems from that viewpoint and appears to be making changes to better the end user experience. The reality of how twitter functions might be that the end user experience is the tip of the iceberg and all the rest of the iceberg that supports the tip has nothing to do with end users and is more focused on c…

Imagine if Elon had instead come in and not immediately idled half the company. But instead wrote an inspiring message about Twitter was popular and pretty good but not living up to its full potential. Spend about 2-3 months learning all the details of the internal systems. Meet daily with the heads of every area and listen to what they're saying. Then, after about 3 or 4 months, come up with a plan that clearly indicates he expects more effort from the employee base, and anybody who doesn't want to sign up for that is free to leave. Then make a modest set of reasonable changes, do some testing on the new features, and slowly improve the product.

The opportunity was there to do this, but Elon is just a chaos ninja and is very big into unforced errors that negatively affect his own success.

Re: Is Elon Beyond Reproach?

#28

Post by mattbrewsbytes »

feet wrote: post #26
mattbrewsbytes wrote: post #24

What I think Elon is missing out on is he has the perspective of the end user of twitter and perceives all the problems from that viewpoint and appears to be making changes to better the end user experience. The reality of how twitter functions might be that the end user experience is the tip of the iceberg and all the rest of the iceberg that supports the tip has nothing to do with end users and is more focused on c…

Is disabling the 2fa miceoservice without removing existing 2fa from accounts better for user experience? Users normally like to log into services they use, but I may be wrong.

That's exactly my point - he is forcing changes to be made (turn off microservices) without understanding what they do or why they are there - its from the viewpoint of "we don't need all those microservices, its bloat and does nothing for users".

Re: Is Elon Beyond Reproach?

#29

Post by dekhn »

mattbrewsbytes wrote: post #28
feet wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is disabling the 2fa miceoservice without removing existing 2fa from accounts better for user experience? Users normally like to log into services they use, but I may be wrong.

That's exactly my point - he is forcing changes to be made (turn off microservices) without understanding what they do or why they are there - its from the viewpoint of "we don't need all those microservices, its bloat and does nothing for users".

It's sort of like watching somebody learn about Chesterton's fence for the first time.

Re: Is Elon Beyond Reproach?

#30

Post by dekhn »

dekhn wrote: post #29
mattbrewsbytes wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's exactly my point - he is forcing changes to be made (turn off microservices) without understanding what they do or why they are there - its from the viewpoint of "we don't need all those microservices, its bloat and does nothing for users".

It's sort of like watching somebody learn about Chesterton's fence for the first time.

Dang contacted me out of band regaridng this comment and I'll say here what I said there:

I stand by my comments. It kind of looks like you're sympathetic to Musk here.

What Musk is doing is abnormal and needs to be condemned in the most effective way possible. I have determined that occasionally making short statements that are entirely technically correct is the most effective way to do so. I do so in good faith with the goal of this site having high quality comments. This sort of policing seems quite wrong to an experienced Internet user- some of my one-liner comments on the net from the 1980s and 90s can still be found.

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